 This is going to be moderating for us today. I also want to give a very special welcome to our friends online who could view, pull this up anywhere in the world and watch us this afternoon. They have questions or comments. They can certainly use a hashtag can manifest through Twitter and post that there and we will do our best to incorporate that into that conversation. And of course, all of us can continue this discussion afterwards online. And certainly you can access that conversation through actorstheater.org. I believe we are ready to go. So Chris, thank you. Thank you all for coming out on a Sunday, a beautiful Sunday at noon. You're dedicated, hopefully all the discussion up here with you will make that have made a good choice. Again, thank you. My name is Chris Kimmel. I'm the founder of the idea festival, as well as president of the Kentucky Sound Technology Corporation, which is the parent company over the idea festival. I actually did one of these sessions last week. And I think this one will be equally, if not more interesting. It's a really interesting topic. We have some really interesting people here to delve into this. IF University just very quickly is a new development, a new product in the sense of the idea festival, which we'll be rolling out within the next probably about the next six weeks. And it really is our attempt to take what the festival is about and roll that out on a regular basis in the city. We're launching it actually both in Louisville and Lexington. And as you'll see, we only roll out the program. What we're going to be offering is a whole series of regular, small, discussion-centered conversations on different topics and classes, as well as events. And so you'll be seeing that. We just, Dan Cox has been brought on as the chief creative officer for IF University. And what we hope is to really create on an ongoing basis more opportunities like this, and in some many cases, much, much smaller groups to continue to pursue and talk about different kinds of ideas in all different fields. So you'll be hearing more about that in the near future. Today, we're going to be talking about the role of the artist in change and in creativity and the whole issue of creativity and creative thinking and how that kind of comes about and the role that it plays in our society today, whether it be business or science or the arts or education or whatever. Generally, what we do or what I like to do these is nobody's going to open up with remarks and we don't want it to be that formal. I'm going to ask each of our panelists to just briefly introduce themselves and I'm going to throw a question out. The first 15 or 20 minutes will pretty much pursue a line of discussion and then very quickly I'll stop and invite the audience to take part of this discussion. So you can ask questions, you can make comments, you're not limited to anything, but we want you to be a part of the discussion. So having said that, let me ask each person just to very quickly introduce themselves, tell a little bit about themselves. My name's Rick Johnson. I work, they're recording himself. Hello, my name's Rick Johnson. I work for Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation. I'm working with small and medium sized manufacturers around the state of Kentucky to help them grow. I'm Lisa Grown and I'm a playwright and an actor and I live in New York, but I'm actually here in Louisville right now at the Manifestival doing my play, The Verizon Play. Hi, I'm Jamie Imley and I'm an artist and my work exists somewhere between art, design, science, and cultural critique. Thank you. So having said that, we talk about the issue of the role of the artist, creativity, etc., and how, what the artist brings to a particular situation. I'd just start out by asking, is in fact, we talk about design thinking, we talk about science thinking, etc., etc., do in fact, do artists think differently, they actually think differently or they view the world differently, or what is that unique perspective that an artist can bring to any given situation? I can only just speak for myself in that my process is one of an intense kind of immersion process and I call it a transdisciplinary research based process in which I take a given social situation or social problem and I immerse myself in that and then learn as much as I can and then go through a sort of an ideation process where I'm sort of doing research and learning more about the issue and then coming up with various prototypes. I thought just a second, maybe tell them what you're working on right now, your big projects. Sure, so the project I'm working on right now is called The Infinity Burial Project and I'm developing an alternative burial system where I'm promoting the idea of decomposition in our culture as opposed to our current practices of preservation and dealing with bodies and so part of that is I'm training edible mushrooms to become body decomposers and toxin remediators. So I'm building burial suits that have mushroom spores embedded in them and decompiculture kits and I have a society called the Decompiculture Society where members are called decombinats who seek depth acceptance and are interested in developing the way that theater people, theater creators of the world, is that we walk, all of us are walking through the same world. We might encounter different things but there are a zillion billion things we come into contact with and everyone sort of has their own sort of valence of what they take in about that, the narratives they create about that. And I think what theater makers do is to choose a different set of things, a particular set of things. That's what gives, when you say a playwright has a voice. It's because you start to see the world from that perspective. I mean a good writer who can all have a sense of how that works is David Starris, right? It's strange and familiar at the same time, the way he walks through the world, what he sees. And I think that's sort of what theater artists do. And I think other kinds of artists, novelist, poets, painters, I suppose, you pull out things that are in the world levels of experience, you're interested in noticing things and highlighting things, valences of experience that perhaps aren't evident. And that's how we respond to art, right? We're like, I never saw it in that way, and yet I see that that is there, that that is true. Rick, I know a lot of the work you do is talk about many, but it's a lot of design, centered innovation, which brings in a lot of issues of design and art. So how does that kind of go into what you're doing? Well, the technical people, they're taught processes, and they want to follow those processes. And you really can't do anything meaningful that way. You need to understand your customer, get inside your customer's head, and you need to create something that's really going to create a meaningful experience for them. So the design process really isn't so orderly. It's much messier. And so if you sort of collide the two worlds, the final product, while the process may trouble a lot of the technical people, the final product is always very much better. I want to go back to what you talked about C. I remember Picasso, I think, once said, I don't search, I find. And this question of seeing and how we see the world, I mean, certainly I think people do train themselves to see the world differently. Business people see it differently. Artists, scientists, et cetera. It's kind of what you're looking at. And I've often felt, too, that I think that that is a trait that we can actually train ourselves to do. It's not just innate. I mean, I think we can train ourselves to have our radar up all the time. And I'd like to talk about how to do that. That issue of, first of all, when I ask, how does, in your view, do a sign-up artist see the world? And is there something innate after that, or is it really just a process that maybe one of the big differences among various groups is not so much how we go from there, but literally just how we see the world, how we've constructed ourselves to observe things? I mean, certainly, that's what a writing teacher does. That's one thing a writing teacher does, I suppose, is to teach people techniques to do that. Some people are more interested in it than others. I mean, we were talking about this before about how your brain's hard-wired, what it's interesting. You know, whether everyone is capable of the same things everybody else is capable of if you just understand the wiring, I don't know. People are interested in different things. I mean, my brain won't, there are a lot of, you know, I have the intention to be really interested in science, my brain won't really hold certain kinds of specificity very well. I don't know if I can be trained to do that or not. Perhaps you all could help me out. I think one of the things, I mean, one of the many skills that I think contemporary artists, particularly conceptual artists have, is this kind of being able to see the opportunities for disruption in any given situation. Just to give you an example, I worked in New Orleans with the city's recovery, hurricane recovery office, and while I was there, there were, you know, there were thousands of FEMA trailers that were sitting in lots, right, that the government was paying millions of dollars for for rental spaces and all that. And I saw that kind of as an opportunity to think about these trailers and the context of environmental history and the injustices that existed in the Gulf Coast in the region. So that's one example. Also, when we talk about, you know, we talk about artists seeing the world differently and the role of art in kind of problem solving, I always tell the story, we think it's interesting was going back during, something like 150 years ago or whatever, we were struggling, a lot of the scientists that they were struggling with, they couldn't figure out why the sky was light, the way it was in dark, it was called Older's Paradox. And they couldn't figure out as to why, was so many stars in the sky, why in fact the light wasn't evident at nighttime. And they struggled with this for years and years and years and the person who actually first wrote correctly and actually uncovered the reason for that was Edgar Allen Poe in a poem. So I think it gets back to the point where you're talking about disruption, people bringing different perspectives to a problem. I know Leonard Shlain who spoke at the idea festival a couple of times and then of course he passed away a couple of years ago wrote a book, a great book called Art and Physics, about one of the things he talked about in that book is how many ideas, sometimes very complex ideas, were actually first envisioned by artists far before scientists actually kept up, like disliked bend and things like that. So what is it? I mean, what is it in this disruption? What is it about someone who is inclined in that way that sees the world differently? In engineering, they teach people rules and they say here are the rules and I think what you need are people that aren't beholden to the rules. You go back to the mouse, the mouse was invented by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, nobody did anything with it, the standard keyboard had however many switches on it, the key is 115, and how did you do all that with one button? And so it took somebody that wasn't bounded by the rules they were taught, and now we've even lost that one button. So good. So back to the spaces of how all this is based on a platform of creativity, I mean, can you teach creativity? This is something you teachers that just you're either born with it or you're not, like anything else, something that's a little better than others. And I think you put the groups together. I mean, I'm very interested in this idea of looking for areas of disruption. I mean, I think that's right. I have no idea whether these things are innate or can be taught. I don't really know the answers to those questions, but I do, I mean, I think that's exactly key that there is a fascination, an interest in going into an unknown place, going into a fissure, you know, that feeling that there's something, and being interested in dynamics, and being interested in change, being interested in uncertainty, in going toward the place where there's, going toward a gray area. I mean, I think that is the difference between people who are, I suppose inventing something new or interested certainly creatively, but I think also scientifically, and people who are not. Do you go toward certainty or do you go toward that which doesn't add up? I'll stop and open it up now and invite you to join us. I'd like you to follow up on this question about, you know, can creativity be taught? I don't mean just to kids. I mean, can it be, is it something that actually can be passed on or at least some of the traits? Yes, sir? I think that you need a definition of creativity as opposed to originality, because creativity is synonymous in many areas with just problem solving, and it's getting, come out of education, it's getting a lot of use in a lot of areas. But for me, that's different than originality, and I'm not sure what you all are talking about. So when you say creativity, and can it be taught? Well, when I say creativity, I use it very in a broad sense. You know, in a sense I embrace things like innovation, imagination, curiosity, the ability to see things differently. I think it also, in my mind, when I see creativity, I also tend to think of it the applied piece of it, too, that it's someone who, in my mind, is creative, is someone who can also take those traits and actually apply them in some constructive way, take that creativity. Whether it happens to be in science, business, dance, theater, I actually don't differentiate. I think that one of the mistakes we make is that we somehow have, I think creativity is limited to artists or something. And in fact, I think some of the most creative people I've ever encountered were scientists who thought differently. Many of them, police's point, weren't bound by the certainty. We're actually willing to deal with a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty and unknown-type things. So I look at it very broadly defined. Yes? I also talked about, maybe you can't teach creativity, but you can certainly teach people to be more collaborative, and you've got a room of theater artists who, so maybe you can talk about, because sometimes you're gravels of collaboration. Everybody gets that question issue. Maybe creativity can't be taught, maybe, but certainly things like collaboration can be. This is a sort of a small point, but I've worked collaboratively. I mean, anyone who works in theater worked collaboratively. I also worked with a collaborative theater company for many years called Five Lesbian Brothers, and we broke the place together. And so I have a lot of experience with this, but I feel like there's something important in that, to me there's a key, for me a key in becoming a writer, because I was a former before I became a writer, was the moment when I realized that this uncomfortable feeling I had when I was writing was never going to go away. That discomfort was actually what it feels like to make something that hasn't been made before. And I do tell this to my students all the time that we talk a lot about, in our culture, we talk a lot about risk. And I think that there is a way in the sort of operization of our culture, and don't give me wrong, I love opera, but there's a way that we have taken that to mean that you take a risk because that'll feel a little funny, but then it's all gonna work out. But the thing about risk is that you don't know whether it's gonna work out or not. If you actually know the end point, then there is no risk. And any sustained endeavor, I think scientifically, certainly or artistically, you can be assured there will be humiliating crushing failure at some point. You can be assured of that, that's part of the game. If you look at any great artist and look at their career, the arc of their career, you will be certain to find humiliating crushing failure, a period of that, because you can't make something new if you knew what it was going to be, then it would already exist. And I think that's, I don't know, some people have a tolerance for that and other people don't. I think creative people, particularly who are creative over time, who lead these lives over time, they have a tolerance for the possibility, in fact, the inevitability that they will fail. So that's key. I think you're exactly right. I've heard a saying, a scientist one time who was congratulated on a discovery and said, boy, this is really great. What a genius. He said, I failed 146 times. There's only 147 that I got right. And I think, yeah, it's an interesting point. And I do think, a lot of times we call it, one of the number one characteristics I've seen where successful people, I think in any field, tends to be persistence. And whether it's persistence, but I think part of that is you're right. You have to have a high tolerance for failure and for things not going your way. Guy Kawasaki, who started Apple in garage.com, I heard him speak a couple of years ago. And he actually said something that has helped me a lot through my career. And he said, I'm paraphrasing. He said, don't worry about when people don't jump at your ideas. If it's a really good idea, you have to shove it down your throats. And I think you have to have that confidence in what you're doing. Yeah, and you have to live with the periods where you don't have confidence. You have to live with periods of time where you not only not know if you're gonna be right or wrong, but if it's worth anything. If it was all, that's actually what it's like. And I think we look at narratives like somebody like Steve Jobs, and we talk about any number of people and we say they struggled here and here and here. But we picture that they always felt like the successful person at the end. And maybe some of them did, but that's not what it feels like to be in process. And I think that's the important thing to realize is that that horrible, sick feeling that you are alone, you're crazy, you're wrong, and you're going to fail and it's what it feels like. That's not a mistake. And I think that would be the most important thing. If we're not in the room for the human imagination anymore, we constantly need to be stimulated. And I was wondering if you think that they can go hand in hand or if we should solve this a little more about letting our minds wander again. Question about the role of technology and creativity and the fact that we can, as we, everything we want, entertainment-wise or human-knowledge-wise, is at our fingertips now. What do you think? I think there's sort of a great talk about introversion and the power of introverts. And I think that, you know, a lot of, I'm all, obviously I'm all for collaboration, but I think a lot of good ideas also get killed in a group process. And I think it's really critical for creativity and a lot of other processes to be quiet and to be alone. And Steve Wozniak, one of the co-founders of Apple, says, you know, one of the best things you can do is to just be alone and... I couldn't agree more. I think sort of unplugging, doing whatever it is you enjoy doing and I, you know, I have the things I do and they're far away from technology. The interesting thing is, through observation, you actually can learn a lot. You can learn an awful lot. I think there's also an issue, there's the big difference between knowing and understanding. And we can know a lot by flipping things and doing our, you know, we can know. That's not the same as understanding the context. But I think your question about technology is a really interesting one. We were talking in the green room beforehand about the role of disruption and change. And Lisa was, I thought, brought a really interesting point about that maybe, you know, it's not that things don't work currently or now. They work, maybe they work at a time, but times have changed and so now it's time to go on and evolve to something else. And I think one of the big, I think issues for all of us is that one of the things that technology has brought about, at least in my observation, is that people are no longer comfortable, in many respects, being passive recipients of information. You know, people sit home and watch TV and text with other people. And, you know, this whole issue of what technology Facebook and this collaboration and et cetera. And I would ask the question, so, you know, what, maybe in the terms that we're talking a lot about because I know there's a lot of theater people here, what comes after the theater as we understand it? I mean, factoring in that issue of technology is not that there's wrong. Is there, can we just say, well, we're just gonna continue doing it like we've always done it, or is there some way that you begin to involve that technology, embrace it, not to destroy the form, but into expand it? You know, theater has been advertised as dying for hundreds of thousands of years. You know, my sort of theory of the core of essence of theater is that theater does, it's the art form that does something that no other art form does. The operating principle of theater is that it recapitulates that which is the most, the truest, most universal thing about human experience, which is that nobody, no matter who they are, no matter how well situated, how connected, how advantaged, how lucky has any knowledge or control over the coming moment. That is the essence of being alive. We project narratives forwards and backwards, but in fact, all of us are innocence of the coming moment. That is what theater is made of. It's made of watching characters on stage who don't know what's gonna happen to them. And that, when we feel that truth about life, that's when we feel that we are alive, right? That's why we feel that incandescence at a deathbed, at a birth, after a tragedy, in a war zone, because we feel all of a sudden what is true, which is that despite our fondest wishes and our best fight plans, we have no control over what's gonna happen next. And it is completely, is sort of the most humanizing thing we can experience. Theater happens in a room with, and theater is different from storytelling that way, right? So, and it's something that happens in plays, sort of, it happens a lot, because we think a story is dramatic action, but a story is about something that's already happened. What happens in the theater is that a person is telling you a story. That story is either gonna go the way that I thought it was gonna go, or it's not, right? I think that's a very important distinction to make. And theater is happening right now in this room with these people, and we also feel that other balance of the theatrical experience. We can see the actors doing it. That's why for some of us, our most vivid moment in the theater is when something went wrong, right? A set fell or something, or somebody forgot their line or something, and then we're really, you know, it's galvanizing and it's electric. That's never going to stop being amazing to people. People are never gonna stop craving that. And it can't happen in any other way than it happens in the theater. It's very hard to do it well. But doing it well is so amazing that those of us who go to the theater will keep going to a lot of bad theater in search of that moment. When we see that amazing alive, that's why it's still, that's why this thousands of year old art form is still being practiced, and why I think it won't go away. That being said, there are, of course, all kinds of technical things that happened in a theater that didn't use to happen. All kinds of ways to create beautiful scenic effects, and now we can also, you know, we can video theater, and we can look at it in different ways, but we all know that watching a video, even beautifully filmed video of theater, isn't the same as being in the room. So yes, it has, it certainly can change many things that we can do in the theater. There's more sort of video and all kinds of different scenic things that happen in the theater. But the essence of what happens in the theater, I actually think people are, they will always be drawn to that. And in a certain way, I mean, I feel like, you know, many of the ancient cultures of theater have gone away, I mean, Louisville, this theater is kind of an exception with its apprentice program. That's a very old fashioned way to learn about theater. But I actually think there are, there's a lot of really great theater being made in this country right now. And I think technology, the search for human connection through that is, I mean, technology will become more humanized. And I think the intersection of people who are living in the world of, you know, Facebook and their iPhones and whatever, and also doing theater, is going to humanize those technologies, I think. Let me give another view, though, of theater and the story and creating the story. The businesses I work with, none of them are good at all at creating that story and telling that story. And they could learn a lot from theater. Question? Yes? A lot of the online conversation right now tends to be around the collaboration and then the, literally, I mean, on our panel. And one of the questions that was submitted about collaboration and teaching was, could it be argued that you can teach creativity? If so, are there any thoughts on how? We hear that question, question is, can you, in fact, teach creativity and question is how? Does anyone want to respond over? Yes, yes, sir. I teach acting phenomenon majors at the University of Louisville and a lot of the beginning of my work has to do with giving people the permission to imagine because they're taught, most of my students are non-traditional and far older and have come back to college. So their top of imagination is for children and that's kid stuff. So a lot of the work is sort of unlearning, a lot of undoing, a lot of Robert Cohen and Kristen Linklater playing and being free to imagine. And so I think it can be cultivated and fostered because we have to learn as a society that imagination is a good thing. That's an interesting point to so much in our culture. A lot of these traits we talk about, curiosity, imagination, are in fact attributes that are attributed primarily to children. And that's like, you need to go out of that kind of stuff. I mean, that's an interesting point. Yes, yes, sir, go back. Well, I think that creativity is innate in all human beings. We see it in children, like every child knows how to draw, every child knows how to say, every child knows how to tell a story, imagine a scenario and move the fires around the city or whatever it is. And I think that what gets crushed out of people is their desire to expose themselves to the risk that making an innovative jump poses to them. And so I think that what you do in order to discover and fuel innovation is to create an environment where risks are encouraged, where people's failures, which are inevitable with risk, are backed up. And we figure out how to deal with failure very quickly and figure out what ideas don't work quickly and adjust the course. But I think that if you create a working environment either in business or in technology or in the arts, where risk and failure are understood to be part of the process and to be celebrated, then you get a more innovative workforce and a more innovative group of people working together to find new solutions to new problems, which is what you're looking for, because you're always trying to do more with less. The person who, a person who's doing incredible work in terms of helping people reclaim their child-like creative tools is Linda Barry. The cartoonist, maybe some of you know, she's written in the past couple of years two incredible sort of workbooks that are really delightful, and if anybody's interested in looking at this kind of thing, she's the queen of it, she's really amazing. I think those comments were great. In engineering, they teach you that a system can't be stable without negative feedback, and I'll point that out to all the companies I work with that negative feedback or failure is really the quickest way to get to a great success. The second trick that I try on people is asking them, not related to work, what's something they've done that's very, very memorable in their life, and whatever they describe me, it all has the same traits. They didn't think they could do it, they had to learn something new, there was a high risk of failure, and it took a lot of hard work. When they got there, they had this incredible sense of accomplishment, they're gonna remember it for life, so then I go back to them, well, why don't we do that some more then? Jay, do you have anything you want to chime in here? I think maybe just from my experience in working in departments, is that maybe the greater challenge for me I found was helping students to refine their ideas, like the creativity's already there, but it's a matter of refining the ideas and then learning how to execute them, which I think is the greater challenge, because the ideas are always there, it's a matter of picking the best ones, and then distilling it, and then finding the best way to execute it. I've always found, my view is that first of all, I do believe the creativity and innovation can be taught. That doesn't mean that everybody's gonna learn it or adapt it at the same level, I'm using the analogy of music. I can be taught how to play piano. I may not be great at it, and maybe all I can play is chopsticks for whatever reason, but it's not that I can't learn how to play piano, some people will go beyond, some people will be great, some people, for whatever reason, seem to be born to play the piano, et cetera, but I, at some level, can be taught to play the piano. From there, it gets into how much do I wanna work at it, whether the trades, et cetera, et cetera, and to me, creativity is very similar to that. People can be taught the attributes, the traits, the tools that enable us to think creatively, to innovate, to be curious, et cetera. Doesn't mean that we're all gonna do it at the same level, nor should we, and I think that one of the biggest misnomers is, number one, is that somehow you're either born that way or you're not, and secondly, that creativity is somehow the domain of the arts, and if you wanna have creativity, and I remember, I was talking to somebody recently in one of the business schools in Kentucky, and they were saying, oh, we're really excited that we've created this new thrust on creative problem solving, and I said, well, how are you doing it? Well, we're getting somebody from the art department to join our group, and that was their answer, is like, go get somebody from the art department, and now we're gonna be creative. And that, I think that one of the biggest mistakes we've made is sort of one of the things that I give us that really attempts to deal with is that there is no such thing as use of knowledge, and in fact, all these things are part of one, part of the same whole, and that's one of the things we have to learn in that regard, so I think, in my view, it can be taught. Where are you, yes ma'am, in front of me. I guess I feel like from what you're saying, though, is that as far as education goes, as a young person, if you're not exposed to the arts, it really trains you to fail readily and encourages no solution, so if you never have a background in the arts, it would be very hard to get in the habit of failure if you haven't done it as a child. Well, I agree, I agree, I think that's the notion at all. There's nothing such thing as use of knowledge. Personally, if you're gonna drop the arts, to me, why don't you just drop science, too. To me, either one of the same, yes ma'am. I think one of the troublesome issues is what I would call the pressure of the marketplace because it seems to me that both in the sciences and in the arts, the pressure of the marketplace is always for certainty and success rather than uncertainty and the risk and possibility and the potential of failure and the creativity that grows out of that. So there's this conflict between, especially in a capitalist society, to have a commercially successful product at the end of whatever the process is and that that can be the crushing element that finally makes creativity and the commitment to uncertainty really difficult. I couldn't agree more. Yes ma'am. Overarching comment reaction, I feel like sort of what Lisa was saying, isn't that the struggle of life, though? Like the uncertainty is not just a struggle of the creative process, it's not just a struggle of being an artist or being a scientist, not knowing how the experience is gonna turn out and see if the struggle of, as a human being, not knowing and also, I mean, okay, you have a project, it's successful, but it may not be to someone else. So I just feel like it's the ideology behind the process, it's a life ideology that we're talking about, not just a creative process ideology. I would argue, I think just to follow up really quickly, I think you're right and I do think that the, one of the big challenges in the fact that it's a reality in our society today, at least in this country, is that things are commercially driven. It's not that, it's not worthwhile taking risk and being creative, but the fact is, if you can't get paid for it, nobody wants to back it and we just live and we, right now, we live in a very, even, whether it's artists or even researchers, cannot basically pursue their work because no one's willing to fund it if they can't see a dollar sign at the end. Sometimes I think it can be hard to be creative even in an academic environment. Oh, that's some of the worst. What worst? I don't think so. I think I've taught classes in which people have become more creative and if anything, we just try to trick it out of them, but I feel like it's already there to be unfolded, but I'm always so hesitant to grade because if anything, I'm trying to leave them their fear of failing at the door in a really active way, but just doing it in a classroom, they bring a sense of, am I succeeding or am I not succeeding to their presence in the room? Russell? I'm interested in how there's a recurring motif throughout the room, both in the audience and on the stage of the panelists. This idea, I'd like to kind of boil it down to this idea of suffering, almost in a Buddhist sense, a Buddhist philosophy of this notion of life is suffering and that it is an unavoidable aspect of life. If I may just briefly quote the brilliant poet one of my favorites, Alan Gensburg. Well, while I'm here, I'll do the work and what is the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else is drunken dumb show. And I find that to be very powerful and I think that easing the pain of living is something that we're all interested in and so I'd like to, having said that, kind of open it up on stage to the idea of how the arts, be it poetry, theater, painting, what have you, helps to ease the pain of living and how this kind of mysticism of art can help us kind of all on our existential quest in life. The suffering means just the idea of life is not perfect. Right, when life is full of contradiction, I think true joy is full of, you know, I think everything, as an artist, I think everything contains its opposite. I mean, my plays are comedies, but I think what, I mean, I was really interested in what you were saying, essentially, I think about craft, you know. There's inspiration and there's creativity and then there's the long work of making a piece of art and the powerful work of art elicits feelings. Art is not made of feelings, actually. You know, in the theater we make a scaffolding that an audience, I mean, theater only happens in the imaginative intersection between what happens on a stage and with an audience. There is no other thing, there's no book or painting or thing that you can take home with you, that's all that it is. And what the audience feels is not what we're doing on stage, it's not what it's made out of. So there's also a kind of workman-like aspect to what we do. There's an initial, I mean, we have to take leaps of imagination, of creativity, but then there's this workman-like long process of creating this thing that a viewer, an audience, a reader, a recipient intersects with and you feel a lot of different things while you're making it. And one of them, of course, is pleasure. Anybody else have a follow-up on that? Any other answers? I have another question if we were moving forward. Sure, we'll come back. All right, cool. So so much of our conversation has been about the conscious of creativity within academia impacts on larger capitalist markets, which is a very small contingent of people in our country and even less so in the world. So how do you think that conversation about creativity is expanded when we actually try to include more people, the majority of people, people who don't have higher education, people who barely have enough money to pay their bills and aren't exploring other things? How does this conversation about creativity expand when we take it to a more fixed level of I'm trying to get my day-to-day life? That's a good question. You mean Trump's got, okay, that's a good one. Let me know. Let me know. Let me just open up a little bit of one. Go ahead. You have thoughts on that? People are creators. Culture is moved from, I mean, look at the revolution in music that's come from that world. People are always creative. I meet a lot of people as I travel around the state, a lot of young people, and I'll ask them about themselves and what they like to do, what they're good at, and to let their guard down a little and what they really want to do. What kind of thing do they do? And I hear a lot of interesting things and I try to help those people get the courage, the self-courage to do it. And how can I help? I can talk to them. I can introduce them to people that won't reject them. And so I've met some young people that are now doing some pretty interesting things in their life. And it's not about money or it's not about a lot of things. It's about them doing something that they're interested in doing and maybe we're afraid to ask and didn't know how to start doing that. And they took the risk to ask me and in a few cases I've helped them. I think it's a good point because I think that one of the big challenges, one of the big problems in our society, actually the word in our society is that, in fact, your right creativity is not limited to any age group or social economic group or anything like that. In fact, one of the big problems I think our country is facing today and why we have so many problems is that we haven't created enough spaces for people to be created throughout the strata of our society. So we're leaving thousands, if not millions of people behind who have the ability, the creativity, the foresight, et cetera, to help life be more enjoyable for all of us, perhaps to solve problems and that we limited just to limited too much. Success is only understandable in retrospect. We never know ahead of time what's gonna be successful somebody. If any of you've read this biography, Steve Jobs, when Steve Jobs was first going around and he had walked in here today with his idea, he would probably come in here literally without shoes, smelling because he didn't believe in taking baths and probably would be one of the last people that we would say, oh yeah, I wanna have this person in my company or I wanna listen to creative products or whatever. And the fact is that there is no identification of creative people. So I do think that one of the things we do is we have to figure out ways of making the sandbox bigger, involving people like that, giving them opportunities and the most important thing, we have to be listening to them. We can't be rejecting them or pushing them off and say, you don't fit our stereotypes and therefore you don't get to play. Yes, sir? You hear about mathematicians who work on a problem, work on a problem and they don't get anywhere until they just go play the piano for a little while. Do you, as individual artists and innovators, find that that kind of attacking the same problem from different areas and sort of more holistic aspect is helpful and is it necessary? Is it something that works for you and how do you then discern between that kind of holistically attacking a problem and just losing focus and messing about in several different disciplines? For me, field trips are kind of an important part of my work and I've sort of built in that process of constantly going to play the piano into the work by making sure that I'm constantly intersecting with other disciplines through these so-called field trips. So you can build it into your process in some ways. I think the more experiences you have and then if you just sort of let, trying to solve a problem from it, sometimes those experiences will come at you in a funny way. I keep telling Chris I want to teach an IF University course on what my cows taught me about corporate turnaround. I actually think that's a really good question. I think one of the most important things that art does is force us to see the world from a different lens and a different perspective. I think seeing the world through different lenses is the key to disruptive, the disruptive process and the key to solving problems because we tend to see things in very, very linear ways. And we've seen through a lot of research that when you encourage people to look at metaphors and to look at problems from very, very different circumstances, it does facilitate getting a clear perspective and perhaps seeing something in a new, fresh way that they couldn't have seen otherwise. So I do think that actually doing that and building that into our processes by using that word is critical. And I think it's something that we as humans as people have to build into our perspective. I always tell people all the time, read everything you can get your hands on. I don't care whether you're interested in it or not, read it, pick it up, look at it, experience things. You may get to decide you want to spend the next four days reading that same thing, but it gives you something, it gives you a perspective, it tells you how somebody else is looking at the world or adjoining the world that at some point it can be beneficial to you. Yes, Rick? I'm a theater education student and I've been constantly asked the question with our current education system, is creativity being taken out or ignored? And I've actually come to the conclusion that at base value, yes, but there is still creativity underneath the layers. And I was just wondering how can we as theater artists continue to nurture creativity in that underlayer without bringing it to the front layer so that people don't get upset because there are things that aren't very useless. So how can we continue to nurture that creativity, not only in our social systems, but in our community values, outside of our theater spaces? I'm gonna figure out, of course, the sympathy I've argued, it's good for them to be upset. And I know that has to be done in an appropriate way, but it is that discomfort, that disruption that in many cases is the path to something new. Can I just have a comment on that, Lisa? Well, only in that, I mean, I was sort of, this conundrum that you're describing, I was sort of wondering this when Chris, you were talking about, you know, the importance of teaching creativity. I do think that there's a segment, I think it's probably in human nature, but certainly it's very clear in our culture right now, which is not in favor of creativity. Which is not in favor of, you know, which is devoted to kind of a blind certainty. So there's another question. I mean, we all in this room could believe that teaching creativity is a good idea. But what does that mean when school districts are, they would openly disagree. Not even in a subconscious way, they would say that actually is not a good idea. But do they teach you in school a specific skill, or do they teach you how to learn? And so I would look at, this is just the start. Yes, thank you, the very back. The list isn't big enough to me, so I'd be here all day if all the stuff, I wish I had paid attention to when I was younger than school, I don't know. I mean, there's so many things. I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up, and so I kept searching and did a number of different things, and I would encourage anybody to, you know, never lock in on one thing, and you know, don't worry too much about what you want to be when you grow up. Yes, sir, Matt. Yeah. No, no, right in the end. The end row. No, the end row, I'm sorry, right next to it. Even I said it a long time ago. Yeah, so, it's really easy to throw around a lot of big words as an educated crowd that we are here, that's the sense that I get. But how do we deal with the fact that having a conversation like this is in and of itself a huge privilege? The ability to sit around for an hour and talk about creativity is a huge privilege. How do you all deal with it? How do we all deal with that? I'm not sure I understand the question. We say how do we deal with that? What do you mean that it is? Like, I just feel like there's not a really well-balanced or diverse crowd here in terms of, I mean, no, no, I do a lot of things here. I don't want to characterize everyone's perspective, but it doesn't seem like there's someone representing a really super practical, maybe conservative, maybe, as this gentleman here mentioned, just trying to get through the day and survive to feed one's family perspective here. I mean, it just, it strikes me that this conversation is very, very lofty. One thing I'm doing for Chris is going around the state with a program on teaching people, they're talking about what design-centered manufacturing is. We're going to anybody that'll listen. Last week, we were up in Florence, a gateway community in technical college, and a lot of the students that were there were, I think, the class of people that you're talking about. We'll do anything, you know, if you have any ideas of conversations like this we can have with other groups of people, let us know. I think, well, first of all, I think that everybody has to decide for themselves. I mean, creativity, it's like enjoying reading. There's some people who read all day long and some people who have time to do nothing more than read a couple of pages every day. And I think what we have to try to do is, first of all, is encourage people that these things are important for lots of reasons, you know, in terms of just personal enrichment and enjoyment. And so, I think no matter, I mean, certainly there are people whose lives are such that from the minute they get up in the morning to the minute they go to bed, they have to worry about putting food on the table or, you know, perhaps they're sucking some kind of chronic illness or whatever. But I have found that, you know, everybody, that that can fit into our lives in many, many different ways. I'm always struck by, it really bothers me the number of CEOs I run into who tell me they don't have time to read fiction. I would never buy stock in a company whose CEO said they didn't have time to read fiction because that tells me that they don't have a very broad perspective of what they're going to learn. So that's why I would think about that. Yes, man? Yeah, I'd say no, because you don't know what's a good idea till it's all over. I mean, I mean, sometimes they don't even know what it is. I mean, these ideas are only good in retrospect. I mean, they really are, they're only good in retrospect. But, you know, there's so many I'm not sure if they're artists in science. I mean, in fact, you know, Einstein said, you know, if your idea at first isn't crazy, there's no hope for it. The hardest part about collaboration is when everybody that you're collaborating with tells you what an idiot you are. So once you get over that, you know, you know, that people attack you, you know, just get over it and keep moving forward. A couple years ago, we had the festival. We had two speakers to say the festival. One was Ray Rader, the great science fiction writer. And two, we had John C. Wozniak. And both of them actually spoke different times. They both said the same thing in part of their lives that don't ever listen to what people have to tell you about your work. And what they meant by that is not that you can't learn from it and they can't contribute, but don't let them grate on your parade. If you really feel passionate about what you're doing, you have to, you have to pursue it. We have time for one more question. Yes, ma'am? Parts of their day. Any moment when they got to think about something fun or where they got to learn in a new way, that really, from my point of view, from what I saw, really meant something to them. And these are kids who, you know, they are out on the streets, many of them. They don't have parents. They've dealt with things I don't want to mention here. But that doesn't mean that creativity isn't necessary, fully, to every moment that they're living. It's not just about doing something for the sake of being creative. It's about learning, for me at least, and I think for other people too in other situations, it's learning about how to survive in a way that is more manageable for you and more helpful to others. I would just like to say that resources, we're privileged by our resources. If there's a thought that people become creative because people with resources bestow upon them the ability to become creative, people are creative and they don't need our permission to be creative. I want to do a really creative act, see at the idea festival on September 19th to the 22nd this year. We have a great, great, or at least the fourth year. We have three weeks and actually we've got a lot of people dealing with some of these topics. On behalf of Actors Theatre, the Manifest with the American Plays, the idea festival university, thank you all for coming. New Play TV and HowRound.com, I'm curious, how many college days participants and everybody? How many subscribe to HowRound? Thank you very much in the back row. Incredibly interesting, H-O-W-L, round. HowRound. Yes. Go there, subscribe, essays, interviews, articles, totally worth it. On behalf of the entire Step of Actors Theatre, Louisville, thank you so much for College Days 2012.